Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Saskatoon—Grasswood. I am sure he is also looking forward to hearing the government's response to the question raised in the motion moved by my colleague from Carleton that the House call on the government to tell Canadians in what year the budget will be balanced, and to do so in this week's fall economic statement.
It is a very simple and non-partisan motion that does not pass judgment on how this government has been spending Canadians' money. It makes no mention of any of the promises this government made, which I will talk about in my speech. Many promises were made around balancing the budget, but the motion makes absolutely no mention of that. It just asks one simple question to which all Canadians deserve an answer: when will the budget be balanced? What is so scary about answering that question?
One of my colleagues across the aisle delivered a long 20-minute speech, but he did not once address the matter before us today: when does the Liberal government plan to return to a balanced budget? Why is it so afraid of giving us a date for returning to a balanced budget? It is as though the government thinks that balancing the budget is something to be ashamed of.
With Wednesday's economic statement, Canadians are going to learn how this government has been spending taxpayers' money without any real plan to return to a balanced budget. It is no secret that the Liberals are spending money on the backs of future generations of Canadians.
The Department of Finance is not afraid to set a date, and it says the budget will not be balanced until 2045. By then, our national debt will have increased by nearly half a trillion dollars. That is an extra $450 billion that will be added to our debt if nothing is done now. I will be 79 before Canada returns to a balanced budget. Imagine that. Many Canadians who are not even born yet will be 20, 22 or 23. They will not learn at school how important it is to balance their budget, because their country will not be able to achieve a balanced budget. They will hear that throughout their entire education.
Let us not forget what the Liberals promised in 2015, during the last election campaign. They promised to run small deficits for three years and then return to a balanced budget in 2019. They wanted to reassure Canadians by telling them that they would run small deficits because the economy was doing well and interest rates were low and that they they would return to a balanced budget at the end of their term. They said that they would use that money to invest in infrastructure, which would create jobs for Canadians.
First, the money promised for infrastructure did not come, and second, the small deficits that were promised have ballooned massively. I am not tall enough to demonstrate how big the deficits have gotten.
We are in an excellent economic situation globally, and that generates revenues for the government that should have been more than enough for making investments. However, this government has decided to invest money it does not have, money from future generations, to keep itself going and fulfill its promises. In fact, there are a number of promises it has not kept, but I will come back to that.
Canadian families deserve a government that looks out for them and manages their finances more carefully. This year the deficit is close to $20 billion, three times more than what the Prime Minister had said, and the debt has gone up by $60 billion since 2015. Failing to fulfill their promises has now become the Liberals' trademark as they betray Canadians' trust yet again.
We knew that the Prime Minister had had training as an actor, but it seems he also thought he could be a fortune teller. When he announced small deficits, he made an astonishing statement about budgets balancing themselves. The budget would balance on its own. We can see that the Prime Minister does not really have much talent as a fortune teller. Not only will the budget not balance itself, but the deficit will be three times higher than what he had predicted. That is shameful.
The Prime Minister has no talent for fortune telling or for accounting, because he has never really had to worry about balancing his personal finances in his life. Our Prime Minister was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as the saying goes. He never had to balance a personal budget. He never had to worry about having enough money left at the end of the month, about transferring the balance of one credit card to another so that he could put food on the table. He never had to do that. The Prime Minister was born into wealth, and he thinks that he can manage Canada the way he manages his own personal finances, by letting banks and others take care of Canadians' money. That is not the reality of Canadians. Canadians are increasingly worried. They are more and more concerned about the Liberal government's successive, never-ending deficits. A survey published in the Globe and Mail in October said that nearly 60% of Canadians think that balancing the budget should be the government's priority.
We are asking the Liberals to give us a date. When will the budget be balanced? When?
Not only are they incapable of balancing a budget, but they are also incapable of telling us when they will return to a balanced budget, even though this was an election promise.
Not too long ago, in 2015, the Conservatives managed to get our fiscal house in order. The Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance were lucky enough to inherit a balanced budget, at a time when global economic growth was on its way up.
This was after one of the worst global economic crises ever. I remind members that the Conservative government was the first G7 government to get its fiscal house in order and to even post a surplus in the wake of this great recession.
It is sometimes ironic to look back at what journalists were saying a year before the election campaign. I have here an article written by journalist Emmanuelle Latraverse, who wrote, on January 19, 2014, that one of the 2015 campaign issues would be the debate over how to spend the money accumulated by the Harper government. A responsible government would have used this money to pay down the debt, but instead, the Liberals chose to increase the debt and waste every single dollar.
It was not enough for them, so they had to borrow more. What will the 2019 campaign issue be? It will not be about what to do with the surplus, but when the government will balance the books.
Several articles have touched on this issue. In November, Jean-François Cliche wrote in Le Soleil:
When the economy is doing well, the government should seize the opportunity to get back in the black. In fact, injecting money into an economy that is doing well—whether by reducing interest rates or by running up deficits—may even be counterproductive and result in a sluggish economy that leads to a crisis.
When the most recent budget was presented, Sylvain Gilbert, a partner at Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton, stated, “It is very dangerous to run deficits when the economy is doing well.” He added, “[The Minister of Finance] has got himself in a bind, and it will be very difficult for him to get out of it if the economy starts going sideways.”
The problem is that they do not even know what they are doing. They cannot give us a date. We just want a date. When will they balance the budget?
By 2023, the Liberals will be spending more on servicing the debt than we currently spend on health care transfers. That is unacceptable.
I will conclude by once again asking my colleagues opposite a simple question: when will the Liberal government balance the budget? We are asking for a date, just a simple date.
